#((yes basil will bring it up on every applicable post))

[uncle-dusknoir]

spaghetti. ravioli. mostaccioli. fettuccine.

Hehe guys. I figured out how to get rotumblr on my laptop. i can post! it's weird tho. Just wanted to let you know i've ordered a new phone after the BLT destroyed my trusty old friend of many years. It should arrive late this week i hope.

Also i got a rotom phone. Because that way my phone can defend itself from the BLT should the need arise and i'm sure the need will arise. so imma ask two things:

is there someone who can help me set that thing up once it's here?

what nickname should the rotom get? (pls keep the suggestions food related)

[prairiedust]

The Folkloristics of Supernatural

So. Something interesting is happening in Season 14. I suspected that it was coming when they revealed in 12 that Jack’s name would be Jack. Jack as in “the Giant Killer” Jack. Jack like “Jack Tales.” Jack from all of the “Jack and the Devil” stories. This Jack. But Dabb is running a long mytharc, so last season was the set-up for this season-- priming the pump, if you will, for what the writers are doing now, and it came to fruition in the first few episodes.

As I said before, we got a hint of this theme in Jack’s name as well as in the way the season wrapped up with grieving Dean and Dead!Cas mirroring the last scene of despairing Cas and Possessed!Dean. Folklore brings with it the other thematic elements we’ve seen so far-- mirrors (oh my god the mirrors,) recursion and repetition, callbacks, sleep, and sleep-like death.

But why folklore *in particular*? And how is “folklore” as a theme in seasons 13 and 14 any different from the fact that this is a show *based* on folk tales?

This season, the writers are not only telling stories drawn from folklore, they are using folklore and folkloristics (the academic discipline) as a theme.

Andrew Dabb wrote a formulaic tale into the premiere, and I flipped my lid. A formula tale is one that relies on a set structure, such as the tale of Henny Penny, The Little Red Hen, or the Fisherman and his Wife, where challenges or episodes are repeated over and over until all the possibilities are exhausted or something breaks the chain. The story of Michael’s quest is a tale that relies on formula as well as on the structure of a “rule of three,” or two challenges that fail and one that succeeds. He asked a human and an angel what they wanted, before finding a monster whose desires he considered purest. Compare that structure to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or The Three Little Pigs. I have a much more in-depth analysis of the “rule of three” that I will post later. This and other “folklore” elements in the next three episodes established this as an official “Thing on the Show.”

For now and for those of you new to the idea of the study of folklore, I’ll summarize the history of the academic discipline of folkloristics.

More than six hundred years ago, in post-Renaissance Europe, concerned scholars and bored aristocrats started doing something strange.

They started collecting folk stories from the lower classes.

This was strange because the disdain that the “upper class” (which included not just nobility and gentry but clergy and those squirrely scholars as well) felt for the emerging middle class and the peasantry can not be overstated. But perhaps because they were fascinated with that which they looked down upon, many learned men and women during the Age of Enlightenment began to study folkways and oral tales.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, “fairy tales,” “wonder tales,” “Märchen,” and “Mother Goose” stories lit up courts (and later salons) all over Europe. People recorded them from a handy peasant, wrote them down with a judicious application of upper-class refinements, and later crafted original stories inspired by them. There are works that were preserved from an oral version, like Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (which is based on a Neapolitan folk tale but is considered a literary work rather than a transcription and if you read a faithful translation you’d get why that is, he very much polished it with literary allusions and asides) as well as those found in Grimms’ first edition (1812) of collected oral stories which included the bloody version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” then there are folk tales that were cleaned up and sanitized for your comfort, like every Grimm edition since that one, ha ha, and at last there are “literary” fairy tales, or stories that are “original content” but were constructed on a folkish scaffolding like, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Authors still use fairy tales to inform and inspire-- Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling edited several anthologies of contemporary fairy tales or retellings of old tales by modern authors, beginning with Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and ending in 2000 with Black Heart, Ivory Bones which, if you enjoy trope subversion and walking around for days bearing a lingering sense of disquiet, are seriously worth reading.

While the Grimms’ work in collecting German folk tales is considered the “watershed” moment for European folk studies (the Chinese, in contrast, have been archiving oral poetry and stories for thousands of years and Arab Muslim scholars may have started collecting folk tales as early as the 10th century CE,) it wasn’t until about a hundred years had passed from the Grimms’ first publication that the discipline took a distinctly scientific turn.

In 1910, a Finnish folklorist named Artti Aarne published a work entitled ‘Verzeichnis der Märchentypen,” or “Types of Folktales.” He had analyzed his own extensive collection of Scandinavian folk stories and realized that these tales often shared the same plots and elements—helpful animals, daring rescues, clever wives, and more-- albeit in different configurations. He broke the stories down to their essential components-- decoded their DNA, if you will-- and asserted that these story elements were used like beads on a string to construct a myriad of tales. He called these elements “Motive,” or motifs. In 1960, an American anthropologist named Stith Thompson translated Aarne’s work from the German and expanded upon it to include stories from a broader European sampling as well as Native American traditions. This became known as the Aarne-Thompson Motif Index. It is one cog in a larger academic movement during the 50’s and 60’s wherein researchers of all stripes endeavored to unearth the earliest roots of mankind—from the search for fossils of the earliest hominids, to tracing the very first languages, to reconstituting the ur-myths that shaped human culture. Academics and field researchers were determined to pinpoint the moment in time when we became more than just a bipedal primate (if we ever even have.) The Index revolutionized folkloristics as anthropologists and other scholars realized that they could trace these story motifs through time and across geography the way linguists were already doing with sounds and words to compile Proto-Indo-European, the language of Neolithic humans who settled India and Europe, and how geneticists today can trace human migrations out of Africa by studying human genomes.

The Index is a taxonomic classification system, like meteorology or the Dewey Decimal System. There are twenty-six parent categories, with subcategories and more subcategories. The Motif Index is organized alphabetically from A-Mythological Motifs (like creation myths) to Z-Miscellaneous Motifs (such as “Z210: Brothers as Heroes.”) There is an adjacent Index of Tale Types, as well, which works similarly. In the Tale Types Index, for instance, “Tales of Magic” comprise subcategories 300 to 799; one subcategory in “Tales of Magic” is “Supernatural or Enchanted Relatives,” which covers tale types 400-459. Tale type number AT 410 is “Sleeping Beauty.” The Basile tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods” by Charles Perrault, as well as Grimms’ “Little Briar Rose” fall under this category. The two indices operate in tandem-- for instance, the Basile story and the tale collected by the Grimm brothers are the same kind of story, but they have unique motifs. Both Perrault’s princess and the German Briar Rose are the subjects of a dire prophecy-- motif M340-- and fall into a magic sleep, which is motif D1960. Other motifs are not shared among all three stories, like cannibalism. Yeah, that story is buck wild once you go back a few generations.

Anyway, in 2004, the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index was once again revised, this time by German scholar Hans-Jörg Uther, in an attempt to make the index more inclusive of other global folk traditions, and it was renamed the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folktales.

The quest to uncover the proto-stories of our ancestors continues in this very decade in the work of Julien d’Huy, who uses computer modeling to make “phylogenetic maps” of stories from around the globe. He can then create diagrams of a universal story-- for instance the “Cosmic Hunt” (D’Huy 2014).

You can also see the concept of the AT motif index in computer-generated novels and scripts, which are “written” by AIs who have ingested and digested and then assimilated whatever weird-ass shit their creators feed it and from that we get gems like “There is more Italy than necessary” from an AI-scripted Olive-Garden commercial.

The website TV Tropes works very much like the motif index, although in a much less taxonomic fashion—for instance, one trope they describe is “Room Full of Crazy,” a “motif” if you will that tv writers often use as a way of indicating quickly to the audience that a character is off their rocker (or at least obsessive to the point of near-insanity) by showing them writing or drawing something over and over in a notebook, on their bodies, on walls, etc. Supernatural used this recently to let us know how very messed up Gabriel was after his time with Assmodeus in season 13 “Bring ‘Em Back Alive.”

But it is important to remember that Kripke has used this exact trope before, in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” to let us know that Anna was having visions and hearing what would later be known as “Angel Radio.”

To some extent, Room Full of Crazy was also used all the way back in season one in “Dead in the Water” to represent the little boy’s repressed trauma.

The repetition of tropes (or callbacks) that have already been used earlier in the series is another signal that telegraphed this shift into the realm of folk tales and mythology in a thematic sense.

Yes, Supernatural has always been about folk tales and myth. Native American stories like that of the wendigo, urban folklore like the story of the hook man and other perils of “parking,” shtrigas, skinwalkers, etc, have served as both monsters-of-the-week and Big Bads. The premise of the show draws, pishtaco-like, from world stories to survive. But we’re going to dig down and find not just the fairy tales of season 14, but the tale types and the motifs and discover what this kind of focused close-reading can tell us about this season’s values.

Lots of people point out that the Index is dry and strips away so much that you could literally tell a story just by listing the motifs in order (this comment from my folklore prof many, many years ago when we got into the motif index in class.) But that is not at all how the originators intended the index to be used. If anything, as evidenced by the “phenogenetic” tale typing of d’Huy, the presence of a folktale motif is more powerful than any literary allusion or pop-culture reference. If you realize that you’re watching a story that involves a “beat the Devil” premise, and you’ve read some of those tales, they should all light up like a constellation in your memory. You might even mentally replay the electric guitar riff from Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” When we learned that the nephilim was going to be named Jack, and that his mother was hanging all of her hopes on him, you may have subconsciously thought of Jack and the Beanstalk or other Jack tales and made a prediction about the kind of story that we might see Jack feature in*. All the protagonists, all the challenges, all the outcomes of those stories will spread like beacons across a plain-- which is what comparative literature is all about in the first place. It is less about reducing a story to its DNA and more about finding that story’s family tree. And writers like Jane Yolen and the aforementioned Datlow and Windling use these bits of stories to write new ones. Oh and writers like Mr. Andrew Dabb, who used a most familiar formula (to his American audience at least) to start out the season. It’s wild, y’all.

So welcome to the folkloristics of Supernatural. As my favorite professor used to say, are there any thoughts, questions, miscellaneous abuse? My asks are open.

Here’s to a fantastic mideseason.

*allusion is not allegory, meaning you bring in an allusion to another text for depth; if you want to retell the story of Jesus and Christianity you write the Narnia Chronicles. However. Just because Jack was not the one to kill Lucifer does not mean Lucifer’s death was not foretold… the point of retelling these stories in a literary setting is to find the other values that the story can reveal, or to take a trope and twist it to reveal something that had not previously been considered.

Caveat: I’m NOT a prophet. None of us meta writers are. Nothing is stopping anyone involved in the show from making a decision that runs contrary to the story’s architecture, and it’s even been done before. I even have a post about trying to predict from the subtext or even text of a serial publication, like a tv series, that I’ll fit into this series. But anyway, use these posts to “prove” that destiel will be going canon at your own peril. And also I won’t be focusing only on “destiel” subtext. There’s stuff in these episodes for everyone, it’s chock full o’ nuts.

ALSO I have been deliberately staying away from a lot of meta while I compiled this, so if there’s more going on along these lines please feel free to tag me in :)

[josephkitchen0]

11 Home Remedies for Bug Bites and Stings

Let’s face it, no one likes to be bitten by a creepy crawly critter. The itching, stinging, burning, painful response our bodies have to bites and stings can even be uncomfortable. I had never been stung by a red wasp until three years ago and boy did it hurt! I was glad to have a few home remedies for bug bites and stings on hand.

My husband is like a mosquito magnet. We can be outside and they send out signals to let all their buddies know he’s out! Sounds funny I know, but I may get a couple of bites when he gets covered in them. We use natural remedies for bug repelling, but when you work outside in the deep south, you have to keep reapplying. Sometimes that’s just not possible to do soon enough. He gets bitten.

Red wasps seem to think he’s numero uno on the hit list too. Years ago we lived in a small Mississippi town. Granny Edna was the hippie lady in the community who had all the old-timey treatments for things. She taught me to make what she called, The Recipe. It’s good for all kinds of bites and stings. The boys had gotten into a huge fire ant bed and had many bites. It took the fever, swelling and heads down quickly. It’s so simple to make.

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Ingredients & Instructions

One bottle of 91% rubbing alcohol – We use wintergreen.

25 uncoated aspirins

Add the aspirins to the bottle. Shake well until the aspirins dissolve. I let mine sit for a few hours, shaking it when I walk by it until the aspirin dissolves. Shake before each use.

Over the years, I’ve compiled quite a few home remedies for bug bites. It seems some work better on some people than others. I don’t know if it’s skin types, oils or just what it is that makes it so, but it is. These are the ones my family and friends use.

Water and Milk Method

This is a very old method that doesn’t seem to work with anything but whole milk. It’s said to help prevent infection, relieve inflammation and speed relief to the bite.

The milk protein and fats are the ingredients that do the trick. Mix equal parts milk and water. Use a cotton ball or small clean cloth to apply it to the affected area.

Wash the area with warm soapy water after the treatment. Pat dry. You can do this as often as want.

Aloe Vera

The wonders of aloe vera medicinal uses are without question. The vitamins and amino acids it contains are nothing short of miracle workers. If you don’t want to or aren’t able to grow your own plant, the gel can be bought. Many people even drink the juice of the plant for its health benefits.

Apply the gel directly to the skin. It’s great for burns as we all know, but it encapsulates any bite or sting area. This protects, provides soothing relief and promotes healing. You can repeat the application as often as needed.

Ice

As a retired nurse, I think ice is good for many things. Putting ice on a bite or sting immediately numbs the area. This allows the body’s immune response to take over without the discomfort of the histamine reaction. Ice reduces inflammation, itching, and swelling.

Coconut Oil

Many people wonder what is coconut oil good for? We use coconut oil as part of our daily health routine with oil pulling. It’s also a good home remedy for bug bites and stings. Just rub a little onto the affected area. The itching and burning sensation will stop almost immediately.

Banana Peel

Especially helpful for mosquito bites. Of course you peel the banana, then rub the inside of the peel on the bite or sting. It gives instant relief. The only problem I have with this remedy is I don’t always have a ripe banana around. If you get bitten or stung and you have a ripe banana, it’s a quick way to get relief. Some people use it as a tooth whitener. I haven’t tried this on my teeth yet.

Sweet Basil

The healing herbs list is quite long, but one of my favorites is sweet basil. There are many basil health benefits from the vitamins it contains including vitamin C, potassium, omega 3’s, folate and iron to its ability to help you fight a cold. It’s also a great way to treat a bite or sting. Fresh leaves of the basil are what is used. You can crush the fresh leaves and rub them on the bite area. You can also crush the leaves and add a little water to them to make a paste of sorts. Apply this directly to the area.

Lavender Oil

One of my personal favorites. It’s best to put essential oils in a carrier oil like almond or grapeseed oil. I use almond oil for my essential oils carrier. In a small amber bottle I combine almond oil and 15-20 drops of lavender oil. Applied directly to the bite or sting area the relief is instant and I can use it as often as necessary. I have rubbed undiluted lavender oil directly on the area when I didn’t have any mixed up. I’m not saying to do this, I’m just saying I’ve done it and had no problems with it.

Apple Cider Vinegar

Apple cider vinegar works great to relieve a bee sting symptom. I’m currently writing a book about the many ways I use this wonder of wonders. As part of my home remedies for bug bites, it’s indispensable. There’s usually a little burning sensation when applied to the bite area. It’s not as bad as alcohol on a day old cut though. The relief from itching, inflammation, swelling, and pain is instant. Apply with a cotton ball to the area.

Garlic

If you enjoy growing garlic, then you’ll be pleased to learn that garlic can be used as a natural antibiotic because of its powerful antibacterial properties. In a situation where you need immediate relief, crush and rub the garlic directly on the area. Then make a poultice using crushed garlic and water or apple cider vinegar (which I use). Rub the area generously with the poultice and cover with a bandage. It will disinfect and relieve pain, inflammation, and itching.

Tea Bags

Tannic acid found in tea relieves muscles soreness, toothaches, brings boils to a head and more. For bug bites and stings, a tea bag will reduce swelling and pain. Soak the tea bag in water to activate the tannic acid then lay it directly on the area.

I like to boil the water as if I’m making tea. Put the bag in and let it sit for just 1 minute. Drip dry the bag so there’s not liquid running from it. If you squeeze the bag you will loose some of the tannic acid, but it will still retain enough to ease the itching and discomfort.

Plantain Poultice

I’m only just beginning to learn in the wide world of herbal medicine. I’m always amazed at the remedies which lie at our feet. This “weed” is one of the best poultices for bug bites and especially for stings.

You can pick it (be sure you know what you’re picking), chew it up and place directly on the the area or you can make a poultice.

In a blender or food processor, combine 1/8 cup of water and 1/2 a cup of fresh plantain. Use the pulse feature to mix until it’s blended but not watery. It should be a pasty texture. If you over-process, add more plantain and mix again. If it won’t hold together because it’s too dry, just add more water a few drops at a time until you get a paste.

Now, generously apply the poultice to the affected area and cover with a bandage. Change as often as you need to.

Every region and group of people seem to have their own home remedies for bug bites. I know for certain this is not every home remedy there is. These are just the ones used by my family and friends.

Be sure to share your own home remedies with us in the comments. Do you have a favorite or one that works best for you?

Safe and Happy Journey,

Rhonda and The Pack

11 Home Remedies for Bug Bites and Stings was originally posted by All About Chickens